Blue Re-volution: Nokia Developer Conference 2011

The Nokia Annual Developer Conference is here. It's scheduled for 4th November 2011 at ITC Gardenia, Bangalore.

I got the details from this emailer. Head to the Conference Website for more details.

P.S: This (surprisingly) is not a free event. They charge a participation fee of INR 750!

Nokia 'Create For Millions' Contest

Nokia recently added regional contests and prizes to it's 'Create for Millions' contest.
According to a news post on Nokia Developer News:

Nokia’s Create For Millions contest for Series 40 developers has just added regional contests with local prizes: China, Indonesia, the Levant(Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestinian Territories, and Sudan), and West Africa. More regional contests are coming soon, too. Prizes for the regional contests include cash of up to 50,000 euros, as well as Nokia marketing and other promotions. read more..

The Create for Millions contest features four categories where you can bring out your best work for Nokia's latest Series 40 phones:

1. In the Know - we're seeking your Series 40 web apps focusing on news and location-based information.
2. Fun & Games - we're eager to try your Series 40 games and entertainment apps (either Java-based or web apps) that will fill those spare moments during the day with amusing, unforgettable diversions.
3. Emotional Closeness - this is your chance to submit social networking apps that are developed either as Series 40 Java apps or web apps.
4. Access to Knowledge - we want your life improvement apps (e.g., education, health, etc.), and in this category we'll accept either Series 40 Java apps or web apps, too.

The deadline to enter the Create for Millions contest has been extended to 1 November 2011

For more details on the contest, visit contest home page. Good luck!

How to generate a random string in java

Want to generate a random alpha-numeric string in Java? Here's how you can do it.
If you are into coding, sooner or later you will run into this!

There are many ways to do it. Here's the one I used recently in my code.

import java.security.SecureRandom;
import java.math.BigInteger;

SecureRandom srandom = new SecureRandom();
String rand = new BigInteger(176, srandom).toString(32);
/* and you have your random string in 'rand' */

What random libraries/functions do you use?
Write in comments.

Syntax Highlighting for Blogs

Code snippets inside blog posts can be very difficult to read if they are written using normal font.

Consider the following piece of code.

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
sum = sum + i;
}
Code without any special formatting.


HTML <pre>...</pre> and <code>...</code> can be used to preserve the white spaces and long lines.
Here's the same code put inside a <pre><code> block..

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
    sum = sum + i;
}

Structure of the code preserved using <pre> & <code>

This version looks much better than the first one. The monospaced text makes it easier to read.

However, this is not enough. These generic <pre>&<code> do not highlight the keywords in the code snippet. This is where Syntax Highlighting comes into picture.

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup languageas both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Highlighting does not affect the meaning of the text itself; it's made only for human readers/editors. (Read more on Wiki..)

Let us apply Syntax Highlighting to the above code.

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
    sum = sum + i;
}

Now, this looks much better! This is achieved using a third party Syntax Highlighter plugin.
There are many plugins and other tools available on the internet for Syntax Highlighting.

I am using SyntaxHighlighter for this blog. I chose this because it's easy to use and supports many languages. Will talk about plugin integration with blogger in my next post.


Cheers,
Sandeepa Nadahalli